Category Archives: Love Your Neighbor

Who are we responsible to and for? That’s been a question I’ve explored on this blog, which looks at the Biblical jubilee principles — forgiveness of debt, restitution, letting things lie fallow, and bearing one another’s burdens.

With that question in mind, I commend to you an excellent article in the May, 2010 issue of GQ (yes, Gentleman’s Quarterly). Michael Paterniti wrote it, and it’s staggeringly beautiful and very important. Please read it. Even though it’s not online. Go find it. Jake Gyllenhaal is on the cover.

It’s about a man who is a gruff, self-appointed angel who attempts to prevent suicides on a four-mile-long bridge over the Yangtze River in Nanjing, China. Apparently one-fifth of the world’s suicides are in China, about 200,000 per year. And Mr. Chen, who keeps statistics on a blog and whom Paterniti visited for this story, has saved 174 people.

Paterniti describes Nanjing, a city of 6 million, thus: “Daytime temperatures regularly topped ninety degrees here — due to hot air being trapped by the mountains at the lower end of the Yangtze River valley… and, oh yeah, because all the trees had been chopped down — and the sun rarely shone. Meanwhile, the city continued to explode in the noonday of the country’s hungry expansion. The past was being abandoned at an astonishing rate, the new skyscrapers and apartment buildings replacing the old neighborhoods. Everything — and everyone — was disposable. Schisms formed. The bridge loomed. Loss led to despair, which, in turn, led to Mr. Chen.”

And Paterniti described the community of those saved by Mr. Chen: “Of those he saved, some small number met near the bridge every year around Christmas to celebrate their new lives and ostensibly to offer their thanks. As part of the ceremony, they calculated their new ages from the date of their salvation. In this born-again world, no one was older than 6.”

And giving voice to Chen’s reasons for taking on the task of binocular-toting persuasion and suicide prevention, Paterniti writes, “The reason Mr. Chen was in the business of saving lives now was that, as a boy, he’d always gone unanswered. There is a saying in Chinese he used, that he never possessed ‘mother’s shoes.'”

He writes further, “It was from the incompleteness of his own family that he’d built this not-so-secret life as the defender of broken humanity.”

This, people, is a beautiful article. I’ve only given you a taste. Go find it. It’s long, nuanced, important.

GQ has a lot more than cleavage. I enjoy it immensely. Don’t miss this article.

I love how she mixes power D.C. with “regular” D.C. I love her attention to healthy food, arts, people. I wish we were neighbors. We are, relatively speaking, but we don’t exactly hang out together.

But I digress. What I loved most about this article was her assertion that when children are exposed to a variety of things, they begin to know that more could happen in their lives. Let me quote her, not me (way more exciting):

“My life is an anecdotal representation of the importance of music and culture. I grew up on the South Side of Chicago where you had me and my brother and a set of kids who happened to have parents that were a little more enlightened,” she said during an interview about her arts interests and advocacy. “We got to go to the symphony and we got to experience opera and we got to see and go to the museums when we were young. But we were also hanging out with kids who didn’t know these museums existed in the city they grew up in. We grew up with kids who had never seen the lake because they lived on the west side.”

She paused, and her silence underscored her disbelief. “Their disconnect from the heart of the city of Chicago was so deep,” she said, “that they had never seen the lake.”

“There’s a difference between where I am and where many of them are and that’s when I say, ‘There but for the grace of God go I,’ because these kids were smart, engaged,” she said. “They were missing that opportunity, and many times that opportunity came in the form of arts and culture.”

I take it for granted that my children had the chance to experience all sorts of arts, as well as all sorts of all sorts of things. But how can I see to it that all children in our country will have that?

Yes, I’m the last person on the planet to find Mary Oliver’s poems. And here’s one I want to share today from, “Evidence,” one of her fabulous collections. It’s as true a poem for a 49-year-old as for a 60+-year-old.

I was struck with a chapter on living out our faith day to day, entitled “Where the Rubber Meets the Road,” and this passage in particular:

“For years, I ran with the elk (sometimes led the pack) who were convinced God wanted us to birth movements, shift paradigms, and save the world. Given the magnitude of it all, I didn’t have the time, energy, or inclination to help the guy wandering into a coffee shop at closing time looking for a hot shower and a warm bed. I wonder if the good Samaritan story was a secret message to all tire salesmen, truckers, coffee-shop owners, cashiers, waitresses, carpet installers, UPS drivers, accountants, tech-heads, stay-at-home moms, working single moms, bartenders, barbers, and butchers to keep their eyes wide open, because the professionals are too preoccupied with grander things, passing by real people with needs God placed right beneath their noses in everyday life…. Loving the folks in my cul-de-sac wasn’t good enough. I had to do something bigger and more spectacular. I mean, come on, how many people do you know who went off on a spiritual retreat and returned with the grand notion of getting to know the people in their neighborhood?”

Small is beautiful. Big can be beautiful too. But it’s not inherently more beautiful. One person trumps one program every time. One story grabs me; 500 stories wear me out. One person at a time; that’s how love is measured.